To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination. It means to know where you're going so that you better understand where you are now so that the steps you take are always in the right direction.
What is Reverse Design?
The reverse design, or backwards design, process proceeds in three phases:
I. Identify Desired Results
First, you establish your learning goals for the course. What should students know, understand, and be able to do? And how do you prioritize and narrow down the content you want to teach so it fits within the limited framework of the course? Wiggins and McTighe provide a useful process for establishing curricular priorities. They suggest you ask yourself three questions as you progressively focus in on the most valuable content:
- What should participants hear, read, view, explore, or otherwise encounter? This knowledge is “worth being familiar with.”
- What knowledge and skills should participants master? Sharpen your choices by considering what is “important to know and do” for your students. What facts, concepts, and principles should they know? What processes, strategies, and methods should they learn to use?
- What are big ideas and important understandings participants should retain? These choices are the “enduring understandings” that you want students to remember after they’ve forgotten the details of the course.
Answering each of these questions will help you determine the best content for your course and create concrete, specific learning goals for your students.
II. Determine Acceptable Evidence
In the second phase of reverse design, think about how you will decide if students are starting to master the knowledge and skills you want them to gain. What will you accept as evidence that students are making progress toward the learning goals of the course? How will you know if they are succeeding?
Design (verb): To have purposes and intentions; to plan and execute.
When planning how you will collect this evidence, consider a wide range of assessment methods (for example, essay tests, term papers, short-answer quizzes, homework assignments, lab projects, problems to solve, etc.) in order to ensure that you test for exactly the learning you want students to gain. In other words, sometimes our assessments don’t match our learning goals, and we, therefore, cannot attain the evidence we want. If one of your goals is for a student to learn how to problem-solve, give them an assessment that requires a demonstration of their problem-solving skills. Have them write out each step they took in addressing the problem, and an explanation of why they took it, instead of simply providing the right answer.
III. Plan Learning Experiences and Instruction
Finally, after you have decided what results you want and how you will know you’ve achieved them, then you start planning how you’re going to teach. You can now move to designing your instructional strategies and students’ learning activities. What are the best exercises, problems, or questions for developing your students’ ability to meet your learning goals? How can they practice using new knowledge to gain the skills you want them to learn? How can they apply their learning? Devise active and collaborative exercises that encourage students to grapple with new concepts in order to “own” them. You want to foster increasing understanding, not rote memorization.
To learn more about reverse or backward design, check out Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe.
https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/understanding-by-design/
